Mixed Race Studies

Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia

Johns Hopkins University Press
1993
432 pages
ISBN-10: 9780801852510; ISBN-13: 978-0801852510

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Drawing on extensive anthropological fieldwork, Peter Wade shows how the concept of “blackness” and discrimination are deeply embedded in different social levels and contexts—from region to neighborhood, and from politics and economics to housing, marriage, music, and personal identity.

Table of Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• I. Introduction
  • 1. The Racial Order and National Identity
  • 2. The Study of Indians and Blacks in the Racial Order
• II. Cultural Topography
  • 3. A Sense of Place: The Geography of Culture in Colombia
  • 4. Antioquia
  • 5. The Atlantic Coast
  • 6. The Chocó: Rain, Misery, and Blackness
  • 7. Heroes and Politics: Quibdó since 1900
  • 8. The Chocó: Poverty and Riches
• III. Chogoanos on the Frontier and the City
  • 9. Unguía: History and Economy
  • 10. Unguía: Ethnic Relations
  • 11. Medellín: Working in the City
  • 12. Medellín: Living in the City
• IV. Blackness and Mixedness
  • 13. Images of Blackness: The View from Above
  • 14. Images of Blackness: The View from Below
  • 15. The Black Community and Music
  • 16. Whitening
  • 17. Prestige and Equality, Egotism and Envy
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: Tables
• Appendix B: Figures
• Appendix C: Transcripts of Responses by Chocóanos to Questions about Medellín
• References

Illustrations

• A suburb of Quibdó
• A street band in Quibdó
• A woman mining by hand in the Chocó
• A mechanical gold dredger in the Chocó
• A main street in Unguía
• The central square of Medellín
• La Iguana, an invasion settlement in Medellín
• El Salon Suizo, a bar in central Medellín

Maps

• Colombia
• Colombia: Northern region
• Colombia: Northwestern region

Introduction

The study of blacks in Colombia, despite the seminal efforts of a few dedicated researchers, is neglected relative to the ethnohistorical and anthropological study of the indian populations. The idea of a “racial democracy” in Colombia is still pervasive, and despite refutations of this myth from academic and popular circles alike, some people of all colors and classes can still be heard to avow the insignificance of race as an issue, especially as far as blacks are concerned.

The reasons for this have, in my view, to do with the complex interweaving of patterns of both discrimination and tolerance, of both blackness or indianness and mestizaje, or race mixture. This interweaving takes place within a project, managed mainly by elites, of nationhood and national identity which holds up an image of Colombia as essentially a mestizo or mixed nation. Blacks and indians can, therefore, although in different ways, be both excluded as nonmestizo and included as potential recruits to mixedncss. Such a racial order, I believe, is not characteristic of Colombia alone, but has echoes in many regions of Latin America. In this book, I examine the coexisting and interdependent dynamics of mestizaje and discrimination in a variety of contexts, at different levels of resolution and in distinct realms of social action.

To talk about “blacks,” “indians,” and “race” in Latin America, or indeed anywhere else, is in itself problematic. It is generally accepted that “races” arc social constructions, categorical identifications based on a discourse about physical appearance or ancestry. This is not a universalizing definition good for all places and times because what is to count as relevant “physical difference” or relevant “ancestry” is far from self-evident. There is apparently the “natural fact” of phenotypical variation from which culture constructs categorical identifications according to social determinations, but positing a nature/culture relation mediated by this “productionist logic” (Haraway 1989, 13) obscures the fact that there is no prediscursive, universal encounter with “nature” or therefore with phenotypical variation. These have always been perceived and understood historically in different ways, through certain lenses, especially those ground in the colonial encounters that have privileged the phenotypical differences characteristic of continental space, rather than those characteristic of, say, “short” and “tall” people. As such, racial categories arc processual in two ways: first, as a result of the changing perceptions of the nature/culture divide that they themselves mediate; second, as a result of the interplay of both claims to and ascriptions of identity, usually made in the context of unequal power relations. The second process is of particular significance in the Latin American context because one feature of a racial order based on race mixture is ambiguity about who is and who is not “black” or “indian.” In the United States, South Africa, and many European countries, although ambiguities do exist, there is more general agreement between claims and ascriptions, and thus more clearly defined categorical boundaries to races, than in Latin American countries such as Colombia. There, the boundaries of the category “black” or “indian” are much disputed and ambiguous, even while clear images of a “typical” black or indian person exist for everyone, including “blacks” and “indians.” In this book, although I will not always enclose the terms “black,” “indian,” or “race” in quotation marks, it should be understood that if by their very nature they are not self-evident categories, this is especially so in the Latin American context.

Ambiguity about blackness or indianness does not, however, mean the insignificance of blacks or indians, or more exactly, of people for whom blackness and indianness is an important aspect of personal and social identity. In this book, my concern is with blackness, and I focus on a region of Colombia, the Chocó province of the lowland Pacific littoral, where this is particularly evident. There, blacks form about 80 or 90 percent of the population, and blackness has been and still is a critical feature of regional history and identity. I look at the region’s inhabitants, the Chocoanos, in the heart of this province and also in the two sites of my field work: one right in the north of the Chocó, in an area heavily influenced by nonblacks; the other, beyond the Chocó, in the city of Medellín. My aim is to examine the coexistence and codependence of blackness and nonblackness, of discrimination and race mixture in these regional contexts. My contention is that the Chocoano material illuminates the more general nature of the Colombian racial order and Colombian national identity. By the same token, the Colombian material sheds light on other Latin American nations in which discrimination and mestizaje also coexist and in which projects of national identity have also had to deal, albeit in different ways, with a past and a present of racial heterogeneity.

Blacks are present and blackness is an issue in other areas of Colombia besides the Choco: the whole southern Pacific littoral is, if anything, blacker than the Chocó; the areas around Cali and Cartago have significant black populations; the Caribbean coastal region has concentrations of blacks in various areas, and more generally has a heavily negroid population; there are pockets of blacks, often migrants, in most cities, including Bogota. I do not pretend to cover all these different contexts, some of which have already been studied (see, for example, the works by Whitten, Friedemann, and Taussig listed in the References), but I do introduce two other Colombian regions into the picture, although neither is my principal focus. One is Antioquia, the other the Caribbean coastal region, both neighbors of the Chocó. Their presence in the book has two purposes. One is mainly from the central Chocó, Antioquia, and the Caribbean region; my second was in Medellín, provincial capital of Antioquia. Some knowledge of these other two regions is thus clearly indispensable in order to comprehend the ethnic interaction between their people and the Chocoanos. The second purpose is more strategic. My aim in this book is to examine the interplay of discrimination and mestizaje. My main focus is on the Chocoanos. But this interplay had very different outcomes in different regions, according to local conjunctures of political economy and demography, and Antioquia and the Caribbean coast form perfect counterpoints to the Chocó in this respect, with the Caribbean coast intermediate between the evidently black Chocó and heavily “whitened” Antioquia. In short, if the national racial order of Colombia is based on the contradictory but interdependent coexistence of blackness, indianness, mixedncss, and whiteness, then it makes sense to examine other regions where these elements and conceptual categories worked themselves out in different ways. The first chapters therefore explore these two regions before turning to concentrate on the Choco itselfc In the rest of this introduction, I elaborate the themes ot blackness, indianness, race, and the nation…

The influence of racial admixture in Egypt

Eugenics Review
Volume 7, Number 3 (October 1915)
pages 168-183

G. Elliot Smith, Professor of Anatomy
University of Manchester

I suppose it is inevitable in these days that one trained in biological ways of thought should approach the problems of anthropology with the idea of evolution as his guiding principle’; but the conviction must be reached sooner or later, by everyone who conscientiously and with an open mind seeks to answer most of the questions relating to man’s history and achievements—certainly the chapters in that history which come within the scope of the last sixty centuries—that evolution yields a surprisingly small contribution to the explanation of the difficulties which present themselves. Most of the factors that call for investigation concerning the history of man and his works are unquestionably the direct effects of migrations and the intermingling of races and cultures.

But I would not have you misunderstand my meaning. The forces of evolution to-day are at least as potent to influence human structure and capabilities as they were in the past to bring an ape to man’s estate. The effects of selection—not only the variety which Darwin qualified by the term “sexual,” but also what we have learned to call “organic” and “social” selection—are certainly emphasised by the heightened powers of discrimination which the intelligence and the fashions of civilised man create.

But one of the effects of the contact of races of different origins and traditions—each of which in its own particular way and in the seclusion of its own domain had successfully overcome the difficulties of existence, and incidentally become more or less specialised in structure and ability, as the result of thus meeting and overcoming its own special difficulties—was the benefitting of the whole community of intermingled races by the knowledge and experience acquired by each race individually. The pressure of maintaining the struggle for existence was thus enormously lightened and the influence of such factors correspondingly lessened. The apparent inhibition of some of the potentialities of the force of evolution among civilised men is not to be regarded as a token of its dwindling efficacy, but rather as an effect of the superior knowledge and experience of mankind enabling him to shield himself against those destructive factors that weeded out and so more rapidly modified his ancestors before they had acquired this wider experience and accumulated wisdom.

Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that during the last sixty centuries the distinctive features of the main subdivisions of mankind have undergone surprisingly little modification…

Read the entire article here.

Where Do We Come From?

Discover
2003-05-01

Kathleen McGowan

Photography by Katy Grannan

A new generation of DNA genealogists stand ready to unearth our ancestors. We may not like what they find.

Brent Kennedy’s 19th-century ancestors stare out from his photo albums with dark eyes, high cheekbones, olive skin, and thick black hair—a genetic riddle waiting to be solved. It comes as no surprise that Elvis Presley, Ava Gardner, and Abraham Lincoln may be among their kin, yet the members of this tribe have never fitted properly into American racial categories. Depending on the census taker or tax man, they were classified as white, “free persons of color,” or mulatto, often drifting across the color line as they moved from county to county.

Kennedy calls himself a Melungeon, but no one knows exactly what that means. There are perhaps as many as 200,000 Melungeons in the United States today, all descended from a mysterious colony of olive-skinned people who lived for centuries in the foothills of the Appalachians. Some say the Melungeons can be traced back to Portuguese sailors, shipwrecked in the 16th century, or to colonial-era Turkish silk workers. Others point to Gypsies, to Sir Francis Drake’s lost colony of Roanoke, or to the ancient Phoenicians. It’s not even clear where the word Melungeon comes from: It might be derived from the French mélange or even a corruption of an Arabic or Turkish term for “cursed souls.”…

…In the United States, where the proverbial drop of blood was once enough to distinguish a freeman from a slave, telling such stories is far more than a pastime. Less than a century ago, for instance, the Melungeons’ hazy racial status was enough to win them a long list of enemies. Virginia townspeople once hauled them into court for attempting to vote and hung them for marrying white women. One crusading Virginia state registrar launched a campaign in the 1930s and 1940s to hunt down all Melungeons and reclassify them as “colored.”

The term Melungeon was a slur until recent decades. “The Melungeons were always some other family who lived over on the other ridge,” says Jack Goins, a retired glass cutter and television technician who has spent decades researching his ancestors. Darlene Wilson, a 50-year-old administrator and history teacher at Southeast Community College in Kentucky, says that when she was a teenager in the 1960s, working at a lunch counter in Norton, Virginia, her boss made her scrub the booth after the Melungeons had finished eating.

Growing up in Wise, Virginia, Brent Kennedy had no clue that he was related to those shy-looking people who kept to themselves up in the Appalachian hills. He didn’t look particularly Gaelic, with his cornflower blue eyes and bronze skin, but Melungeon roots were something polite people didn’t talk about. After he began his genealogical research in the late 1980s, one great-aunt torched a collection of family photos and letters, and other relatives stopped speaking to him.

When Kennedy approached scholars with his questions, they couldn’t be bothered. Anthropologists and historians like Virginia DeMarce of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., had already settled the Melungeon question, they said. Kennedy’s people were an insular group like the Louisiana Red Bones and the South Carolina Brass Ankles. They were a “triracial isolate” with white, American Indian, and African-American blood—a footnote in history.

So Kennedy did his own research instead. His book, The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People, is part memoir, part manifesto. It draws on his family story and genealogy to show how the Melungeons, like African-Americans and American Indians, have been victims of vicious racism—and how they have struggled to protect themselves through assimilation. Kennedy’s thesis became a rallying cry for many Melungeons, but historians scoffed at his less-than-rigorous approach. Kennedy “essentially invented a ‘new race,'” DeMarce wrote in the National Genealogical Quarterly in 1996, a “historically nonexistent oppressed minority that belies his own ancestry.”…

Read the entire article here.

Book explores racial identification

The Post and Courier
Charleston, South Carolina
2011-04-24

Karen Spain, legal writer based in Nashville

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White. By Daniel J. Sharfstein. Penguin. 416 pages.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, “The Invisible Line” is a fascinating history of how three mixed-race families migrated across the color line and changed their racial identification from black to white.

The Gibsons, wealthy mulatto landowners in Colonial South Carolina, were white Southern aristocrats by the time of the Civil War.

The Walls, slave children freed by their white father, became respected members of the black middle class before giving up their prominence to “become” white.

The Spencers, hardworking Appalachian farmers in eastern Kentucky, spent almost a century straddling the color line.

The three intricately woven genealogies reveal an America where race has never been as simple as black or white. In rugged environments where survival meant relying on neighbors for security, commerce and marriage, it was easier to assume everyone was the same than to draw impenetrable distinctions between the races…

Read the entire review here.

The Triracial Experience in a Poor Appalachian Community: How Social Identity Shapes the School Lives of Rural Minorities

Ohio University
June 2005
176 pages

Stephanie Diane Starcher

A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Education of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Education

This study investigates the ways racial labeling and the stigmas associated with a poor rural community influence the life circumstances of a group of triracial families living in Appalachia. Qualitative interviewing techniques are used as a way of understanding what is going on in the daily lives of participating triracial families. The data reveal that markers of distinctiveness associated with race, class, and place shape the identities of participants, which, in turn, influence their school experiences. Participants who identify with the African-American sociocultural group experience a “caste-like” status because of the compounding effect of racial stigmas and stereotypes of place and class. Faced with such oppressive life conditions, participants report that social advancement is nearly impossible. The values of competition, achievement, and securing an ever higher standard of living that are promulgated by the school compete with participants’ version of what constitutes the “good life” in this rural setting. Students must often choose between the beliefs of their own culture and those advanced by the school. Participants report that community members who do not share these multiple markers of distinctiveness are less likely to experience such cultural conflict and the same degree of marginalization at school.

Read the entire dissertation here.